ABOUT THE MISSION CENTER

We are nonprofit professionals serving nonprofit professionals.

Our mission is to provide critical administrative services to nonprofits in an affordable, streamlined manner so they can lower their costs, focus on their true mission and maximize their social impact. In addition to providing accounting and health insurance services, Nonprofit Services @ The Mission Center provides a host of other consulting and capacity building services to agencies of all sizes. Please contact us for more information, or to start a conversation about how we can help you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization!

Mission Center clients and members benefit from products and services in four key areas: Accounting, Human Resources, Insurance and Consulting. Collectively, our work is conceived as interlocking “Centers of Impact” that create what Rev. Starsky Wilson of the Deaconess Foundation has described as “Capacity Building 2.0.”

Our goal is to provide the organizations we serve with a new paradigm for executing the critical administrative functions upon which high-impact programs transform into long-term systemic changes in our communities.

HISTORY

We were established in 2010.

In April 2010, Chris Miller and Christy Maxfield launched The Mission Center L3C, Missouri’s first hybrid, for-profit social enterprise. Conceived as a social enterprise incubator and accelerator, TMC L3C rapidly began accelerating the core business lines of what today is Mission Center Nonprofit Services – an administrative services organization dedicated to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the nonprofit sector through economies of scale in back-office operations.

OUR MISSION

Our mission is to collaborate with nonprofit professionals, board members and donors to create more efficient, effective and sustainable organizations. We provide outsourced administrative services, strategic consulting and professional coaching and mentoring services designed to maximize the sector’s use of staff and financial resources in order to create the greatest social impact.

OUR VALUES

Efficiency – allowing them to put less time and money into non-core functions;

Effectiveness – freeing their program staff to focus on mission activities and empowering leadership to make timely, well-informed decisions

Sustainability – saving time and money on administrative functions that create cost savings and demonstrating good stewardship of contributions; and

Transparency – providing access to services and best practices that ensure regulatory compliance with IRS requirements, as well as accountability standards from the IRS, Better Business Bureau, Charity Navigator and the United Way.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Traditionally, a nonprofit organization’s effectiveness has been judged largely on its ability to minimize overhead (administrative and fundraising expenses) and maximize program investment. Most foundation and corporate donors explicitly prohibit the use of their contributions for non-program related expenses. Consequently, many organizations strive to provide services to their constituents – achieve their mission and purpose for being – with little to no investment in professional administrative services such as human resource management, accounting, information technology services, program evaluation, legal services, facilities management and marketing. Instead, program staffs attempt to perform essential management functions, in-kind and pro-bono services are utilized from any number of sources and professional services are purchased ad hoc with the lowest bids driving the selection of providers.

Likewise, capacity building has often meant helping social workers, teachers and other front line service providers learn how to be better bookkeepers, HR managers, purchasers, etc. It is our position that this ultimately only serves to distract nonprofit professionals from their core competencies and that about which they are most capable and passionate: their mission.

The current paradigm of nonprofit management results in a less efficient and effective use of philanthropic resources – both money and personnel. In turn, this diminishes the capacity to serve clients and jeopardizes the stewardship of donated revenue. Mission Center Nonprofit Services exists to fundamentally change this paradigm so that organizations can focus on what they do best – their missions – by outsourcing core administrative functions to an entity accountable to its own mission and committed to providing the sector with the highest quality, market-tested services at the lowest possible cost.

OUR STRATEGY

Mission Center Nonprofit Services strives to develop and apply innovative solutions to the nonprofit sector’s management needs. We fundamentally believe the sector’s current focus on the concept of collective impact is powerful when applied to administrative and program areas across mission spaces.

Although more common, mergers are the exception not the norm. Likewise, without discrete funding to support multi-organization coordination and collaboration these efforts are often only possible and effective among large, well-funded agencies and missions.

Economies of Scale – delivering services on a large scale in order to drive down cost, improve quality and increase access to higher levels of competency and skill – is the underlying paradigm of the Mission Center’s Nonprofit Services. By putting these economies under one roof we create a “one-stop-shop” for administrative functions as well as management consulting services for those we serve.